Has the ‘Occupy’ Movement Changed Public Opinion?

By Christopher Shea

Has the ‘Occupy’ movement shifted public discourse on issues of inequality? The political scientist Larry Bartels takes a close look at polling data, and finds some surprising results. On the one hand, a recent poll found that

58 percent of the respondents favored the idea of increasing taxes on the wealthy, while only 25 percent opposed that idea. By a roughly similar margin, 52 to 22 percent, the respondents supported congressional Democrats’ plan to extend the payroll tax cut and offset the cost by imposing a new tax on millionaires.

That would seem to suggest that the answer is a clear ‘Yes’ — voters don’t think the “1%” are paying enough in taxes. But not so fast! Unfortunately for those who would posit a connection between the protests and public opinion, those figures were about the same in polls taken in 2010 (a good year for Republicans) and 2008 (a good year for Democrats). Bartels writes:

There is remarkably little evidence here that the public as a whole has moved to the left on the most significant policy question currently bearing on the issue of economic inequality — or even that the public has become increasingly engaged in that debate over the past year.

What is even more striking is that President Obama has, at least so far, seemed to benefit remarkably little from being on the popular side of the debate about taxation.

Since 2010, the right have enjoyed a resurgence of their own with the Tea Party - at least Occupy have partly off set that.

12:09 pm January 19, 2012

Adam P. wrote :

The Occupy position hasn't claimed to change a lot of people's minds. They've said that people already support some of their positions (such as increasing taxes for the wealthy) but that those were ignored by the two parties and media.